In Search of Dr Watson

By Molly Carr

In her third book author Molly Carr has, for the moment, abandoned the Watson-Fanshaw Detective Agency in favour of discovering as much as possible about Doctor Watson. Radically different in style from her first two books, the investigation will nevertheless be of interest to students of military history, railways both Indian and British and of course all fans of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is a household name. But where would he be without his Biographer? Beavering away in Baker Street, unknown to everyone except Scotland Yard and a few luckless criminals. It is time to put the loyal and much put upon man, Dr. John H. Watson M.D., centre stage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MX Publishing
• Release date: Nov 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781780920320

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Introduction

There are several ways in which one can search for Doctor Watson, or indeed any fictional character of sufficient interest to a large enough number of readers. But the main way is through the information given about him by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This can be both amplified and commented on. However, there is also the use made by others of the character as a Watson, or someone very like him.

This is what I have tried to do in this book; so that it falls naturally into two parts: the Doctor as written about by Doyle, and an exploration of the concept of the foil before, during and after the first appearance of Watson. How successful have other authors been with their Watsons, both male and female? And how successful are the tales which, sometimes bearing little or no relation to the original, nevertheless continue to be written because the character (and the detective he admires so much) has acquired a life of its own? This, in my opinion and that of others, has the potential to make anything new as interesting as the canonical investigations: or perhaps even more interesting to those who like their heroes’ adventures brought up to date.

But, according to P. N. Furbank in volume seven (‘The Modern Age’) of The Pelican Guide to English Literature edited by Boris Ford, in seeking to modernise him the status of the hero has sunk. Violent and treacherous criminals can only be defeated by a corresponding amount of violence and treachery. The reader, while theoretically remaining on the side of law, virtue and patriotism, is able to enjoy the criminal life to the full. An exception to this is Sapper’s hero Bulldog Drummond, an active, courageous and honourable Edwardian gentleman who defends himself with his fists as befits his code. According to Furbank he can, on occasion, show unexpected mental resources as well: making him a mixture of Holmes and Watson. But, again according to Furbank, in the newer thriller the moral issue is of little account. The hero is no longer a gentleman but an efficient and savage animal, with gleaming teeth, lean body and narrow hips; an anonymous engine for detection, murder, fornication, the driving of fast automobiles and the consumption of branded goods.

One of the great charms of the Holmes-Watson tales is that in recreating them as they were, or as nearly as we can make them to what they were, we experience a kind of longing, a nostalgia for something which, according to Michael Holroyd in a B.B.C. Radio 4 broadcast, we never really had: a straining after an earlier era which, rightly or wrongly, is now seen as less stressful, less frantic and less frightening. Perhaps that’s why television’s latest attempt to drag Doyle into the twenty-first century by providing Sherlock Holmes with mobile phones, high-powered microscopes and the ability to send text messages has met with such a mixed reception from so many ardent fans.

But according to Alan Bradley, in an interview for New Books, detective fiction has moved out of the drawing room into the gutters and back alleys of large cities, and in so doing shifted from humanity to technology. However, it is still the case that ‘The tension between the act of murder and its setting is paramount. Sudden death in a rubbish bin is hardly surprising, while some unpleasant character, bumped off during an English village’s festival of carols, seems bursting with colourful possibilities’.

Sudden death in any kind of bin wouldn’t suit Doyle’s style at all. He rarely offends against middle-class mores, or gives too distressing a picture of the times. He wouldn’t, for example, let ‘The Cardboard Box’ be published as part of a book after it appeared in The Strand Magazine. It was too shocking.

Richard Lancelyn Green, in his introduction to The Oxford Sherlock Holmes, says that Doyle was adept at promoting his own work. A promotion also evident in the text of his tales. Most of Holmes’ Adventures include one or more references to the other investigations. Doyle also paid to advertise Sherlock in a number of newspapers. Are these perhaps two of the many reasons why this particular detective became so much part of the National Psyche?

To T.S. Eliot, in a review in The Criterion for April 1929, the greatest of all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries is that ‘When we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence’. This reality was a quality which from the beginning ‘struck readers and critics alike’. From fiction the Great Detective became, in the minds of his readers, non-fiction. Along with his willing companion. So, in the opening chapters of this tale, we go with Watson to university, follow in his footsteps to the Royal Military Hospital at Netley where he trains to be an army surgeon, help him decide which regiment he should be in and how to find his brigade, sympathise with him when he is struck down by enteric fever, supposedly in Peshawar, and see him safely to London and his momentous meeting through the agency of ‘young Stamford’ with the only consulting detective in the world. Someone whose name figures in no newspaper and who claims no official credit for solving crimes.

We later meet the Doctor as friend, companion and chronicler and discover he is a fine literary historian, as well as an enthusiastic traveller. He is also fond of music, particularly ‘scotch airs’, and the German composer Mendelssohn. He knows something about art, thinks Sherlock doesn’t and is then contradicted by him. But, unlike Holmes, Watson cannot dismiss an investigation from his mind while it is still in progress. He is also quite incapable of keeping a secret.

The ex-army man can be found, very thinly disguised, in Agatha Christie; and his appearance in the media dates from the earliest invention of radio, television and film. In addition to all this, Watson’s writings have been an endless source of interest for those determined to sort out the chronology of his adventures, the date and number of his marriages, where he went to school and even what he had for breakfast – and where he had it.

We can marvel at the liberties taken with Doyle’s text in order to fit a theory: and watch some writers quarrel with the author’s own description of Watson to the extent that, although when he first arrives on the scene he is still in his twenties and said to be as thin as a lath, (and later so good-looking that Holmes says he has natural advantages with women), he is often portrayed as middle-aged, large, ugly – and looking more like a Prussian bully than an English gentleman.

Sherlock Holmes wasn’t given much of a biography by Doyle, and there is a sense in which he doesn’t need one. His all-absorbing interest in crime makes him slightly inhuman and something of a cipher. Wherever he wanders, his base is always Baker Street and he stays there even after Watson leaves, presumably now able to pay the rent without the assistance of a fellow lodger. Watson has written up many of the investigations for the editor of a new magazine and will continue to do so, bringing that little bit of extra fame which must increase the number of Sherlock’s cases and presumably his bank balance. This despite Holmes’ insistence that the work is its own reward - though he makes a notable exception when dealing with the Duke of Holdernesse in the enquiry known as ‘The Priory School’.

But apart from the scant information the Detective gives about his ancestry – his forebears were country squires and he had a French grandmother – there is little to build on if one wishes to write a half-ways true story of his life. Why, he doesn’t even divulge enough for us to discover with any certainty which university he went to, Oxford or Cambridge!

Later writers can indulge their imaginations by giving him a wife, children, grandchildren or whatever else they fancy. They can involve him in adventures with the famous and the infamous, the living or the dead, the real and the unreal. They can turn him into a ‘Doctor Who’ figure as in the latest BBC television series, or make him a champion pugilist in the latest action-packed film. A film which pushes his intellectual prowess into the background. One or other of us will swallow anything, whole. But perhaps there is a kind of inevitability in the more high-profile protagonist in a series becoming the main focus of attention; although a book by Joseph Green and Peter Ridgeway Watt published in 2007 (Alas Poor Sherlock –the Imperfections of the World’s Greatest Detective, to say Nothing of his Medical Friend), doesn’t forget to include Watson. However, according to Mark Campbell in Sherlock Holmes (Pocket Essentials, 2007), A good way to measure the appeal of any fictional character is to see how many imitations it spawns. This, as he says, would make Sherlock Holmes very popular indeed. He was imitated very early on by J. M. Barrie, and even Doyle himself who wrote a parody (‘The Field Bazaar’) for an Edinburgh University magazine, The Student, less than ten years after the publication of A Study in Scarlet. In addition to this, the period between 1896 and 1920 saw hundreds of attempts to copy Doyle’s most widely known creation. Since then, Sherlock has been involved with Dracula and Frankenstein (two characters which attract as much attention as himself judging by the number of times they are parodied), met with aliens from outer space, used to solve real-life crimes and paired with several famous real-life people such as Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell. In The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, labelled ‘tasteless’ by Owen Dudley Edwards in his book The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, Michael Dibden has the Great Detective crossing swords with Jack the Ripper. Other authors with the same idea produced their own books, which include Robert Weverka’s Murder by Decree and E. B. Hanna’s The Whitechapel Horrors.

When considering a life story, however, Watson has both too little and too much biography; and what is there is so muddled and mistaken that it becomes something of a marathon to sort it all out. In addition, Doyle gives the supposed Doctor so little to do in the medical line that one could be forgiven for thinking he might have been a ward orderly at Netley sharp enough to pick up sufficient knowledge from the doctors surrounding him to pass himself off as an ex-army surgeon (who, however, had never been near Afghanistan) and that his later ‘Practices’ consisted mainly in providing nostrums for rich old women with imaginary illnesses. This subversive theory would receive a set-back when Watson met Your old schoolfellow, Percy Phelps during the investigation into a stolen Naval Treaty. And, before that, his dresser recognises him as his former boss at Bart’s.

There would also be the wounded shoulder and the tropical tan to account for. But none of these hurdles stopped‘Sagittarius’[Olga Katzin-Miller] from questioning the Doctor’s credentials in The London Mystery Magazine, where she writes:

Holmes left one unsolved mystery,

The case of the strange M.D.;

Was he ever qualified?/

Had he anything to hide?

And why was he always free?

Facts of his previous history

Researchers fail to trace,

But there’s something queer in his medical career,

For he never had a single case!"

This last line, of course, is an example of poetic licence. Watson treated Vincent Hatherley for quite a serious wound in ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’, and says he sometimes saw injured railwaymen in his surgery. But it is interesting to note that he was being presented as bogus over sixty years ago.

However, it emerges that the Watson character is technically no less important than Holmes. The French writer Pierre Nordon, in his book Conan Doyle published in translation in 1966 by John Murray, says that as a companion and a witness to Sherlock’s powers of detection the Doctor is the very incarnation of vox populi, making him democratic and thus very popular abroad. He has both psychological and literary significance. And, according to Ian Sinclair in his 2001 Introduction to the Penguin Classics Edition of A Study in Scarlet, Watson was invented to invent Holmes. He is a provincial innocent enough to do justice to the Holmes legend, and provides the framework within which Holmes can demonstrate his genius.

The Doctor regards the Detective’s deductions as almost miraculous until they are explained to him. He is, therefore, often behind the readers, who may already have some inkling of what is to be revealed later and can thus feel very superior. As a result of this feeling, they will always be on Holmes’ side – even at his most maddeningly secretive. The Detective knows all, will eventually tell all, and the readers are (for the most part) up there with him. Watson is around to ask questions as the story progresses, which is a great help. He does this even when Holmes is not present, resting his wounded leg and soliloquising among the newspapers as he tries to work out the various puzzles presented to him.

On a more domestic level Terry Manners, in his book about Jeremy Brett published by Virgin in 1997 (The Man Who Became Sherlock Holmes: The Tortured Mind of Jeremy Brett), says that Watson saves Sherlock from himself. Without him the detective could have gone mad. With all his consuming interest in crime he would have lost his mind without someone sensible by his side, someone he could impress, who would listen in awe, who would nag him to eat, remind him to dress properly, warn him of the dangers of cocaine. And even Holmes himself (in ‘His Last Bow’) says Watson is the one fixed point in a changing world. But he is also a courageous military man and, judging by the gradually increasing size and importance of his Practice as it moves towards more and more impressive addresses, a successful doctor – who also understands psychology. The Holmes-Watson narrative is constantly enlivened by exchanges between the two men, making it more dramatic in form than if there were one narrator. There is an interplay of character which would otherwise be absent. On a more mundane level, a single narrator (unless the reader is willing to suspend disbelief altogether) cannot be everywhere at once. Neither can he be doing everything at once.

For example Sexton Blake, the inspiration of a journalist named Harry Blythe (who first called him Frank and then by a stroke of genius changed the name to Sexton), was largely intended for a juvenile readership and initially appeared in a magazine for boys called The Halfpenny Marvel. He had Edward Carter (nickname, Tinker) as a side-kick. But Tinker didn’t write up the stories. He was not created to do justice to Sexton by bringing him before a wider public. His job was to run errands, see that the car ticked over efficiently and bring it round from the garage immediately it was wanted. He fetched and carried and was a general factotum. A sparky street arab or young vagrant, he lived in the same house as Blake and a rather ill-defined housekeeper. There is no explanation of why this was so, but the cheery broad shouldered youngster proved a staunch and efficient ally in many a scrap, or if there was a job to be done. He also kept Sexton’s books of press-cuttings carefully indexed and up to date, without which help the detective’s efficiency would have been seriously impaired.

As soon as he caught on, Blake moved from North Street, Strand, to an address in Baker Street. Where, according to Jack Adrian in his Introduction to Sexton Blake Wins! published by J. M. Dent in 1986, He looked more like Holmes than Holmes himself due to a less than subtle nose-brows-chin job. And, moving with the times, became an adventurer and a secret agent rather than a detective – being written about by a wide variety of hacks and outlasting his rival by more than forty years. For while Sherlock pondered, Sexton rolled up his sleeves.

A hero cannot boast of his own successes without becoming a figure of fun, as Conan Doyle shows in his Adventures of Brigadier Gerard: I have told you, my friends, how I triumphed over the English at the fox-hunt when I pursued the animal so fiercely that even the herd of trained dogs was unable to keep up, and alone with my own hand I put him to the sword.

If either Watson or Holmes had been made a figure of fun it would have considerably weakened the impact of the latter’s detective prowess. The former couldn’t, of course, appear cleverer than the main protagonist if tradition was to be preserved. But neither could the Doctor be entirely without brains. However, this didn’t stop Doyle writing (in his book Memories and Adventures after discussing Holmes) I would like to say a word for Watson also, who in the course of seven volumes never shows one gleam of humour or makes a single joke.

Well, he may not have indulged in knockabout farce, but nevertheless a sly gentle kind of fun is there in several passages. One of which leads Holmes to say Watson is developing a certain kind of pawky humour. Something we suspect when he says that Holmes, when holding forth about one of his cases is, in reality, taking about as much notice of his foil as he would of his own bedstead. Humour implies intelligence, and there are many occasions when Sherlock welcomes his friend’s observations.

Holmes is a household name instantly recognised. As Andrew Taylor says in an article written for The Times Crime Supplement on October 9th 1999 (‘The Books They Couldn’t Kill’) "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dwarfs them all in terms of the influence his creation has had. Since A Study in Scarlet was published in 1887, Sherlock Holmes has patrolled the mean streets of London and the equally dangerous homes of country gentry, wielding his superior intellect like a cosh. [He] has spilled into 20th century myth, [thus] becoming a folk hero for the Industrial Age."

In another article for The Times Crime Supplement for September 30th 2000 (‘A Century of Suspense’) comparing Holmes with Inspector Morse, Marcel Berlins says that the two men are remarkably similar. They are Curmudgeonly classical music-loving bachelors, dedicated to their profession, each with his doggedly faithful and admiring side-kick on whom to unload his brilliant thoughts [and they] clearly form part of the same brotherhood of detection. Even their basic methods – interviews, analysis of clues and insight into human emotions – have remained much the same.

Almost every other character in the canon, from Lestrade to Irene Adler and Mrs Hudson, has been at the centre of one of their own detections – gaining readers solely from their association with Baker Street. Even Moriarty became the central character in books by John Gardner – portrayed, as Mark Campbell says, as the blackguard he is – and in a series by Michael Kurland, who turned him into a hero. But it is obvious